jQuery .ready not firing on first load in IE, but will sometimes work later

I'm pulling my hair out here and I know that this question has been asked countless times before, but I've tried every one I can find to no avail.

I'm working on a wordpress site and I've got some custom jQuery scripts running. As per usual, everything works beautifully in everything except IE. Anything that happens within jQuery(window).ready(function($) {} fails to run the first time, but will run sometimes when refreshed or in script debug mode. What could possibly be going on here???

Here's what I've done.

Moved jQuery(window).ready(function($) {} to the end of the script file

Changed jQuery(window).ready(function($) {} to jQuery(function($) {}

Checked to make sure that the </script> tag exists at the end of the script declaration in the head

Removed an external reference to jQuery to make sure that I'm using the built-in Wordpress version.